Story, This
by PeechTao
Summary: A Jedi prisoner has a dramatic link to Dooku and QuiGon. What secrets does she share to the receptive Mace Windu?


**A/N** this is meant to utterly confound you, my reader. I hope it is too your tastes and that you enjoy it! Rated M for minor suicidal thoughts.

**Disclaimer:** I own my characters! Nothing else . . . :(

**Story, This**

She walked blankly through the rain, stumbling over the steps. She dropped to her shaky knees and let the pooling water gently touch her lips. How odd, and yet exquisite it all was. The swirls of blackened vision interpreting what the world before her may hold. The pale, discolored eyes hoping, dreaming, for a sliver, a speck, of distilled light to pierce the darkness. Low, it was not to be.

Her hands probed the stony staircase the way she had known for so long of them to do. She climbed, lowly, belly nearly dragging in the silken puddles to feel their utter and terrific relief. She reached a hand far before her to feel an approaching wall.

It was so far away. How could it ever be reached? This endless abyss, this eternal blackness that blinded her, bound her to its horrid whim of helplessness?

She would defeat it. Overcome its handicaps. She pushed on, rising to her knees now, in grip of the joy overcoming her soul. She would conquer this pyramid of stairs and see redemption, salvation.

To her feet now, staggering but in control finally of the delectation. Nothing was resolved, not until that building was within her reach. The swirls of shaded gray and mists of her mind attempted to make sense of the surroundings. Combing every memory and remembering every scent and touch and feeling that tried to rise in her preoccupied heart. The meaning was clear, and yet in some ways to simple, to astounding, to . . . to much of what she had been wanting these ten long years.

The rain beat down in thick sheets, heavy waves that fell with the sounds of reverberating lightning. Each strike bristled the hairs on her body. She could feel them in her bones, in her mind. Her clothing though torn over time and bleached in the thousand sun rises ad sets, was now weighed and soaked, but her mind was nonetheless happy.

Marble walls met her acute fingertips.

Her breath caught in a shattered moment in her lungs, threatening never to be released. Her sightless eyes sting with each raindrop that meets them, but she came forward beside it all. She pressed her face against the cool marble wall, tears now mixing with raindrops.

_**Do you no why I cry in the rain? No one can see the tears.**_

She smiled in her mind at the saying, told to her so long ago . . .

"Can I help you?" A voice asked, sweet and quiet, but not void of a careful concern.

She tilted her head to him and collapsed to her knees, the exertion too much on her frail body.

The apprentice rushed forward to catch her in his arms. He looked about, as if she was a lost child and he was to find her parents. Strange for a woman perhaps mid twenties to be missing her parents. He shook the idea out of his young mind and lifted her into his arms. If she had come to the Jedi Temple, it would be for a reason.

He brought her promptly to the Healing Wing, but having other duties more important than a fainting stranger he departed with little more thought of her short future.

* * *

She awoke in a haze of blankets and the faint aroma of nothingness. A particular smell of an utter void that was only present in a hospital wing. She rose to her elbows and let her hands caress the sheets, walls, and pillows. Such softness and chill she had not experienced in a ream of days and nights. Oh the basking luxury of it all! The never ceasing kindhearted tenderness that must have allotted the space for her own use. 

"I guess you are comfortable?" A new voice asks. It is simple, singsong almost like a doctor regretting the sight it sees and yet attempting to retain calm for the patient's behalf.

She smiled excitedly, stretching her slender toothpick arms into the thick, dry air. Her back bones, as exposed as they were, crack in succession as if replying to the comfort.

"What is your name?" she asks the doctor. Her voice seems foreign to her. It has been some time from which she has spoken with another living being.

The faint screech of a hard metal chair alerts the blind to what the other has done. The woman doctor pulls the object directly beside the bed. "I am Winna Di Uni. And may I ask of your name?"

She sat up in bed, touching her toes as if to make sure each one of the nine were in there proper position. "You may ask," she says, now pricking at her fingers, "But I may not know how to answer you. For, in all too true of a reality, I am everyone and noone. A being who has seen the galaxy, and yet suffered the blindness of over exposure. Do you have fruit here?"

"Not here, no." Winna replies, she watches the strange movements, almost as if nervous ticks. The patient rubs her hands through her hair now, picking out random strains to braid. "But before your travel," (she had decided to humor the positively insane woman) "what was your name?"

"It is a good thing about the fruit, I will never eat another bite as long as I live." She lays back down, braiding her hair as was costmary practice of her morning routine. She could sense the hesitation of her doctor, the depressed anxiety of an unrevealed truth. "At first, I was Makii. The apprentice of the most beloved Master, though dismal and hideous I knew him to be. But now, I have killed that person who was me. That inexperienced flutter of an improvable existence, full of life and energy that was hanged and drowned within the twelfth tide. She put up no fight, mind you. The process was simple, oh, so simple."

Winna wrote the name down and handed it to a silent nurse who stood waiting by the door. The nurse disappeared out the door and into the shadowy halls of early morning.

"Now," She continues, "Now, I am Naiya. I am The Dreamer. And yet, do you know the difficulty of dreaming images that your eyes will never again see? Or dreaming in a total and dismal blackness, and yet being able to experience the fantasy world you are locked in? Mind you, it is not an easy process."

Naiya's eyes loll back in their sockets as her world disperses into a swirl of strange thoughts. Her heart flutters in her chest as she attempts again to release a breath that seems doomed to lodge in an unforgiving chest.

Winna stands, nearly nonchalantly and injects a strange reeling liquid into one of the tubes strung into Naiya's arms. The stranger returns to what normality that could possibly be imagined after such an ordeal. She returns speaking, as if nothing had stopped her voice.

"It is an increasingly difficult process that continues on, untamed in the subconscious, in the imagination. I dream as the memories of my life are eaten away by the sea. As the memories leave, so the sanity of my dreams too leave. I survive on a systemized insomnia."

A man enters the room, his head shaved bald and his stance tall and mighty. He strides across the room and takes Winna's place without uttering a word. When settled and alone in the room, for the doctor has decided to leave them, he speaks. "Tell me who you are."

Her blind eyes blinked at his, sealing minutely over the blueish white cataracts. She strokes a finger along his jaw line before withdrawing it and rolling away from him in her cot. "I? I am ambiguity. And you?"

"Master Windu, of the Jedi Council. I understand you were a Jedi once also." he tries to remain aloof, but concern is ticking into him like the gentle caressing tingles of a time bomb. He sees the medical equipment heaped around, the life support beeping and clicking in his ear, the tubes of blood and God knows what else. She had not long to live.

She did little to respond to him. A humorless shrug was all that he received.

"I am here to know your story. I want to know what it is you have gone through." He tries a new tactic.

She sat up again, feeling the dizziness, but letting it slip away. Her story was to be told. It was all that mattered. All the years it took in refining and here it was in a silver plate ware of impossibility. She would make the most of it then curl up and die in her agony and emotional tumult.

"A story has only one true beginning." Naiya enters, "it always starts with happily ever after. Though mine was unhappy, then and hereafter. It was the fault of an uninterested Master. One who, when his apprentice was forced into slavery by the cruelest of life in this galaxy's seven heavens never attempted a rescue. How I despised him. For so long I despised him with utter and complete hatred that would have Yoda himself confining me to a pine box. Now I have found peace, though I doubt he has ever found his.

"I was tortured, you see. Sold and bought, sold an bought, like a bloody cockroach to whoever had a taste for my fine hair and vibrant eyes. Oh, the eyes would catch each one. Their defiant look of looming wildness. When I finely killed my last slave trader I was released like the animal I had become. They set my on a uninhabited planet, on the farthest deep space reaches. They would return when I was broken, though I was soon also forgotten.

"I survived three years of slave life, pleasing whatever undesirable needs my Master felt fit to subject me to. I spent one year in hiding, making a slow, progressive step toward home, toward the Temple, only to be carted away by my first owners to the planet without name or number. Six years on that island was torture. My eyesight left in the first year, never to return.

"I spent my days, wandering the coasts for easy meals that my hands may prescribe as edible while once touching mouth the fruit of the land becomes nothing but bitterness and poison. I tried to kill myself three times. Shall I tell you how?

"The first, how amazingly simple. I waded out into the ocean waters, an ocean I cursed and now greeted. Unable to see how could I defend myself? I walked as far as my feet could reach the sandy, rocky bottom, swam as far as arms could beat against aged surf. I made little progress in sliding to the bottom of an endless sandbar. Drowning myself was an impossibility.

"That's as much as I will tell you of those times. It's hard to speak of, you must understand. I lived. I lived in such secrets." She stared at him with dull, dead eyes. "Get my Master. I will only continue for him. Count Dooku, you understand that too I assume?"

Mace looked crestfallen. It was general knowledge that, after training another apprentice, Dooku left the Jedi Order. "Count Dooku, he is no longer . . ."

"His apprentice then." She replied just as quick, having read his thoughts.

Mace nodded, though he knew she had not seen the move. He stood and called a healer to bring the new Knight to them.

Naiya was true to her word. She refused to speak, even with the promise of the apprentice's soon arrival. This was her moment before death. She could feel its clammy hold rising from the pits of her brain, coming forth with the spiny tendrils of impossibility and denial. She savored its strange taste in her mouth, its panicky rhythm of a heart murmur.

The man showed up at a point where Naiya thought she may hold out no longer. With ease, and race such long repetition of the scenario in her mind played out, she returned to her story.

"I knew your Master, whatever-your-name-is. He was a brute of a man. Evil, and lacking the tender heart a woman of my age needed. I assume he was that way with you, I assume a lot of things now. He left me to rot. On that odious island, planet . . . Did he ever do that to you? Perhaps it was just my luck. Just mine." Her eyes rolled back in their sockets once more, she fell shakily into the bed blankets. She had to finish.

"They came back, eventually. I didn not let them escape my hands this time. I killed them, all of them. Whoever was closest, or farthest. I could not see them die, for my eyes had long since left me, but I felt their life slowly fade into barrenness. I don't know where the ship took me, it just drifted. For one who has tried to kill herself three times, this did not matter. Somehow. I came here."

The young man in the chair leaned forward and placed a hand on her face gently. His eyes had welled with tears he knew he should have been stronger then let fall. The woman was tragic and beautiful. Dealt such a formidable blow that left her undeterred. "I will remember." he tells her in a hushed whisper. "I will. I promise. You will not be forgotten."

She stroked his hand on her chin and smiled with the last traces of life. "My name is Naiya Makii. I was a war prisoner, but I can never say that. I have a story. I was on an island . . .an island . . ." The memory of those brain washer's faces plastered on her inner eyelids, she drifted into the abyss of the afterlife. Doing just as she was told. Remembering the story, telling the story, they had told her over a thousand times.

* * *

ohh, double harsh, aye? Please review! 


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